Ross speaks on topics including Indonesia, Bali, Cancer and wellness. Also on social matters within our community.

Saturday, September 27, 2014

Stopping the boats gives our neighbour's kids freedom

Ross B. Taylor

The only news we read these days
about asylum seekers is from human rights groups who express concern over the
detention of children being held in detention centres in Australia, Manus
Island and Nauru. Only last month the distinguished Australian, Alastair
Nicholson AO, who is a former chief justice of
the Family Court and current chair of the advocacy group Children’s Rights
International, expressed his deep concern about the plight of foreign children
being held in custody by Australian authorities.

These concerns are valid, and many Australians would
probably have the view that it is inhumane for young children to be held in
detention for extended periods of time, albeit usually with a parent or an adult
family member.

Immigration minister, Scott Morrison argues however,
that preventing hundreds of people from drowning at sea whilst taking the
highly dangerous journey from Java to Christmas Island is ‘very humane’. He
also points out that all children are ‘protected’ whilst in detention, are
segregated from adult detainees, and are afforded treatment that is
‘appropriate’ for children.

But what would happen if we started locking-up these
asylum seeker children in our maximum security jails alongside hardened adult criminals
including rapists, murderers, and paedophiles? Impossible? Yet that is exactly
what Australia did to children from Indonesia over a four-year period as part
of a policy designed to stop the activities of people smugglers.

During the time of the Gillard government, arrivals
of asylum seekers into Australian territory by rickety old boats threatened to
overrun the entire border protection system. In its haste to be seen as ‘tough
on people smugglers’ the government introduced legislation that would see those
involved in the transport of asylum seekers sentenced to mandatory five-year
terms in Australian maximum security jails. This sounds reasonable one would
think, yet no one considered the horrifying possibility that the people smugglers
may seek-out young children from remote Indonesian villages to work as
deckhands on these boats? This is what they did.

The end result was that by 2011 there were over
fifty Indonesian children - some as young as 13 years of age - locked up in
Australian maximum security prisons, including here in Perth, as ‘people smugglers’. These kids, most of
whom were educated to around year three at some small village school, were
placed in an environment where they were in daily contact with convicted adult
criminals.

The Australian government’s original intention was obviously
notto lock-up foreign kids, but as a
result of the new laws this is what happened. The most disturbing aspect of
this outcome was for our government to then simply deny that poor children from Indonesia had been
caught-up in this terrible trade and in a number of cases knowingly allowed
under-age children to be placed in these adult prisons, often without trial,
for over two years.

One case involved a young boy, Yasmin Ali, from the
small island of Roti in Eastern Indonesia. Yasmin was only 13 when arrested in
2009 (for being a kitchen-hand on one of the asylum seeker boats) for his
alleged involvement in people smuggling. He was then held in Perth’s high
security adult prison (Hakea) for almost 12 months awaiting trial. When Yasmin finally
faced the Perth District Court in 2010, the Legal Aid lawyer - who was supposed
to be representing this boy - failed to present to the judge documentary proof
that Yasmin was born in 1996, and thus was only 13 when first arrested by
Australian authorities.

The Department of Immigration was also in possession
of additional documents, that had been earlier handed to them from the
Indonesian Consulate in Perth, confirming the boy’s age. These documents also, were
never presented in court, nor acted upon by the Department.

Yasmin Ali was consequently sentenced to five years
jail in a maximum adult prison here in Perth.

The plight of Yasmin and numerous other Indonesian children
was brought to the public attention as an Opinion piece in The West Australian during April 2011. The reaction from many readers
was either silence or as one responded stated, “...if these children do the crime, they should do the time.” Other
comments included suggesting that as these children were originally from very
poor and isolated villages, they would be ‘better-off’ in an Australian jail
than in their home villages.

Meanwhile, as the children had not been allowed to
make contact with their families back home in Indonesia, most parents had
actually thought their child had been lost at sea, or simply had no idea where
their sons’ had gone.

How could it have come to this? Australia is, by any
measurement, a decent and normally caring country, so how could everyday
Australians take such a view of children as young as thirteen being incarcerated
in our adult prisons? Imagine the reaction here in Australia if a young
Australian boy was locked-up in an adult maximum security prison in Java for
this amount of time? There would have been outrage at the very least. But young
kids from isolated Indonesian villages have very few rights, and certainly no
voice, and there were at least fifty of them trapped in a justice system gone
terribly wrong.

It was only after constant lobbying by a number of
caring organisations, including Australian journalists’ Hamish McDonald and Sam
Clark who actually travelled to these very remote villages, that the Indonesian
government formally took-up the issue with the Gillard government and provided,
in many cases, confirmation of the ages of the children; a number of whom were
pre-pubescent according to Australian doctors who had examined them.

The then attorney-general Nicola Roxon, facing a
diplomatic incident with - and growing anger within - Indonesia belatedly
decided to release these children from jail and send them back home. But the
damage had been done.

The actions of the Gillard government in firstly
jailing these young children, and then to deliberately block efforts to have
their ages verified, resulted in the unthinkable happening. Poorly crafted and
rushed policy saw these kids suffer as no children should; particularly in
Australia.

The paradox is that today, young Indonesian children
are not even being approached by people smugglers. There is no more business to
be done. No ‘fishing’ jobs to offer children as deckhands. The future child
‘people smugglers’ are now where they should be: playing in their villages.

The Abbott government has therefore provided an
‘accidental’ humanitarian gift to these children in Indonesia through its tough
stance on people smuggling and effectively ‘stopping the boats’. But the
question that remains is what to do our regional neighbours do with the
thousands of genuine refugees who are now ‘stuck’ in their countries with
nowhere to go?

At a senior political level, Indonesian officials
acknowledge that since the introduction of the Abbott government’s people
smuggling policy, the flow of asylum seekers coming to Indonesia - as a transit
point ratherthan a final destination - has
slowed dramatically as they learn that the back-door into Australia is now
firmly closed. A ‘win’ for both Indonesia and Australia, and certainly a huge
‘win’ for the hundreds of Indonesian children who would otherwise be enticed
onto these boats by ruthless people seeking to exploit them for their own gain.

2 comments:

This distressing story simply highlights how dishevelled and chaotic was the Rud and Gillard governments. Not only could they not govern correctly all they could do "efficiently" was to catch and jail "people smugglers" aged 13. We are classic policy.